highlike

Synchrometrics

Can we design future memories for the body?
Is the body itself the apparatus for remembering cultural processes?Prospectus For a Future Body proposes new perspectives on how the body remembers and invents technological narratives. Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures?Eternal Summer Storm explores the concept of muscle memory transfer as an alternative form of interactive cultural continuities. This concept prototype speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions. Eternal Summer Storm attempts to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance choreography and experience in ‘A Summer Storm’ (1973) from archival footages.Bionic Movement Research is a collection of experiments on the process of designing digital muscle memory for the body. Inspired by Luigi Galvani discovery (1780) of animal electricity in the human body, these experiments appropriate the techniques of electrical nerve stimulation to choreograph artificial muscle contraction and body movement.

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

Butoh

DeepDream

Okumura dances through morphing DeepDream projections by Michael Tyka. Her piece explores the contrast between Butoh’s inherent downward motion and DeepDream’s “obsessive expansion”. The two systems diverge but find harmony in the alien.

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

works
dance
“I connected with members of Sal Vanilla a Butoh dance group. Butoh is a contemporary dance form born in the sixties. We started a series of collaborations, Light painting at first, then video, then live performances. The collaboration between Sal Vanilla and I, was pure symbiosis.” Patrick Rochon

大駱駝艦
THE GOLDENS
Butoh Dance Performance
la compagnie Dairakudakan a largement contribué à la renommée internationale du butô avec ses créations baroques et spectaculaires…

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

Performing Tongue PhD
Tongue PhD is a new eclectic solo performance by artist Ieva Misevičiūtė. This ambitious piece consists of ten chapters each investigating a different metaphoric lens of the tongue. Tongue PhD fuses elements of physical theater, academic reverie, dance and Butoh, structured in the format of a PhD dissertation. CREDITS concept, text, choreography and scenography Ieva Miseviciutè

大駱駝艦
THE GOLDENS
Fundada en 1972 como una de las primeras compañías de danza Butoh, Dairakudakan es formado por Akaji Maro, basado en los principios “Tempu-Tenshiki” (‘nacer en el mundo es ya de por si tener un gran talento’), creado por Maro, y “Miburi-Teburi” (‘uso de las manos y el cuerpo’). Esta agrupación aparece en la escena internacional en 1982 con el estreno mundial de “Kaiin no Uma ” (El Caballo del Marinero) en Avignon, Francia. Desde entonces la palabra “butoh” ha tenido un gran impacto en otras formas de danza contemporánea.

ILANIO REUBIN AND ELENA SLIVNYAK
SUPREME BEINGS FASHION SHOW

The Supreme Beings Fashion Show will reveal the avant-garde concepts of two local fashion designers, Ilanio Reubin of Ilanio and Elena Slivnyak of IIMUAHII, at the spacious SOMArts Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1st. The two runway shows will showcase 8 imaginative looks from each designer, as well as two short improvisational performances by Butoh (contemporary Japanese) dancers which we find very fitting for the two creatives.Though different in aesthetic, both designers hail from similar backgrounds and aim for analogous goals. Ilanio (San Francisco Art Institute) and Elena (Academy of Art) both found the retail and fashion corporate worlds too constrictive and mass-produced, and thus ventured into their own imaginative ones.
Ilanio works to create “visually stunning fashion concepts that explicitly disregard wearability, saleability, and practicality; that embrace advanced definitions of sexuality and gender; and that defy the commercially-mandated boundary between the fashion and art worlds.” For Elena of IIMUAHIII, her avant-garde aesthetic is manifested in an intricately-crafted sportswear line.Although we’re dreaming of being in Paris (but really, when are we not?), we’re excited to watch Ilanio and IIMUAHII strut and represent San Francisco’s undeniable talent in their nontraditional fashion show and hope to see you all there as well!

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